Metabolic Pathways

Say you want to know what the possible effects of taking a supplement might be.  You could research the supplement on the two high-quality websites that report supplement interactions based on human trials:

Examine.com

The Mayo Clinic - not as many supplements covered.

It would be great if there were reliable "trip reports" from patients on the effects and side-effects of drugs, but unfortunately side-effects are not reliably reported.

If you wanted more basic information, you could consult a metabolic pathway interaction diagram.  Note that the study of genetics and proteomics still has a long way to go:  we don't know what most of the essential genes even do, nor do we know the function of xx% of all genes.  No network diagram is complete....

SigmaAldrich offers a searchable poster:



According to this, NAC can increase glutathione, but also homocysteine. Important information from the network!




Biochemical-pathways.com has even more information.  Note that because the network diagram is again a poster, single compounds (e.g. cysteine) can occur in different places on the diagram.




Metacyc is the most detailed, but only shows one "pathway" at a time.


KEGG is another very good resource with drop-down menus to explore individual pathways.

A long list of other resources.

Locust Functional Neuroanatomy

From Maplike Representation of Celestial E-Vector Orientations in the Brain of an Insect. Heinze et al (2007); Science 315: 995. These are some of the central circuits encoding orientation via polarized light signals. The complexity of the celestial polarized light vectors should not be underestimated, either.